During the course of business, product distributors may deal with claims from customers who purchase their products. A claim may be submitted to the product distributor by the customer when the customer determines that a quantity and/or type of product received from the product distributor is not the same as the quantity and/or type of products ordered from the product distributor. For example, a claim may indicate that none of the ordered products were received (e.g., “zero-fill”), too many products were received (e.g., overage), too few products were received (e.g., shortage), the product received was not the product ordered (e.g., wrong product), one or more component products of a group of products was missing (e.g., incomplete groups), etc.
When a claim is submitted to the product distributor, the product distributor may make a determination on the merits of the claim and, in some instances, generate a correction. The correction may include, for example, credits and/or debits against the amount due either in whole or in part, return of one or more products by the claimant, providing one or more products to the claimant, etc.
Systems and methods have been created to capture, evaluate, and fulfill line item claims. One such example is U.S. Pat. No. 7,124,112 (the '112 patent) to Guyan et al., granted on Oct. 17, 2006. The '112 patent discloses a data processing system for evaluating line item data. In the '112 patent, an insurance host server provides line item data to a claim handler client for evaluation, and receives evaluation information from the claim handler.
Although the system and method of the '112 patent may be capable of claims processing, the system and method do not offer a way to automatically process one or more claims based on a customer's claim history as well as the claim. In addition, the system and method of the '112 patent do not provide a way to improve claim processing efficiency for those claimants whose claim history falls within one or more predetermined thresholds. Nor does the system and method of the '112 patent identify an improvement plan associated with those claimants whose claim history exceeds of one or more predetermined thresholds. Thus, the system of the '112 patent does not offer a way to provide claimants with information regarding process improvement associated with supply chain management. The system and method of the '112 patent also fails to offer a way to reduce the number of claims and their associated costs and improving the efficiency of claims processing.
The disclosed system is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.